Martin Kottmeyer
Magonia 77, March 2002
Flying saucers mostly just flew around when they arrived in 1947. They didn’t land much and we did not see much of who was piloting them. Only four or five such cases have been found that we might fairly term Close Envounters of the third Kind (CE3Ks). This contrasts sharply with the Airship Waves of 1896/97 where researchers have found 36 detailed CE3Ks, at least fourteen of which are explicitly extraterrestrial. A few more seem to be so implicitly.
There is no direct evidence of why Newton chose the small form. The slight geographic distance between Texas and the Mojave raises a question on whether the 1947 Houston Post landing could have had legs enough to have reached Newton. As the saucer in the hoax is described as being over 100 feet across, we can discount the presumption that the statistical bias of saucers to be small played a role here. The mention of the Singer midgets also however brings up an alternative possibility. Earlier in the century, midgets were considered freaks and exploited by carnivals. Coney Island used a veritable army of 60 midgets with spiked backs in its Luna Park space ride to represent Selenites. [55] It spawned space rides elsewhere.
Given so many cases to work with, matching some details would have to be inevitable, even if imagination was a purely random process, which obviously it isn’t. Worse, it is hard to gauge their significance since Michel laments he cannot provide the details of this analysis. We are given neither the cases that matched nor even the details of what matched! [129] What is the most striking incongruity is the presence of alien feelings in contradiction to both earlier SF and later UFO lore that emphasises lack of feelings in Grays. Michel would elsewhere team up with Charles Bowen of Flying Saucer Review to offer the opinion, “We consider the Valensole Affair to be one of the most important cases in the history of the subject.” [130]
References:
Magonia 77, March 2002
Flying saucers mostly just flew around when they arrived in 1947. They didn’t land much and we did not see much of who was piloting them. Only four or five such cases have been found that we might fairly term Close Envounters of the third Kind (CE3Ks). This contrasts sharply with the Airship Waves of 1896/97 where researchers have found 36 detailed CE3Ks, at least fourteen of which are explicitly extraterrestrial. A few more seem to be so implicitly.The entities of the Airship waves showed a bias toward large humans. The Shaw case has Martians seven-foot tall and slender. [1] Next, we get seven-foot tall Jupiterians with long, white beards. [2] In another, we have 11-12 foot tall Martians with ordinary heads that drink air. [3] Next, a 9½ foot tall being suffering from the heat is nearly naked and has a bellowing, musical speech.[4] There is an unusually large Apollo with dark hair and stunted beard, and swarthy complexion, and described as having negro features. He is able to set fire to water while camping here. [5] Another is a tall and spare pilot who looks like a scientist or inventor. [6] A soldier-like man from Mars is 18 feet tall.[7] A crew of Navy men shares a ship with a large portly man with whiskers. [8] People of Neptune and Saturn are described as fine specimens of muscular and intellectual development. [9] Another encounter involves men 20 feet tall and weighing 1000 pounds. [10] This tallies as ten in number.
Only five of the 36 Airship close encounters involve small beings. One set is dressed in furs. [11] Another is covered in down and have light beards. [12] One set involves evil-looking men and women. [13] The most famous case, that of Merkel, Texas, is dressed in a blue navy suit. [14] A figure in a different case says moon men are dwarf-sized. [15] As a matter of lexicological interest, ‘little green men’ were apparently not around during these Airship waves.
Of the others, three are explicitly medium or ordinary-sized. [16] The rest seem normal humans, e.g. Scandinavians, [17] Irishmen, [18] ‘Japs’, [19] a populist, [20] ladies in Easter dress, [21] ladies in bloomers, [22] and men in hunting outfits. [23] Left over, because the size was ambiguous, is the weird being from a better world nearer to the Sun than us that has only one limb like a propeller pointed to the ground.
It should be of interest that at this date there are no good examples of the grays, reptoids, insectoids, space mummies, or robots. In terms of morphology, the figures rarely differ from the human form. Some are idealised humans of some beauty. A more notable generalisation is that a good fraction of these extraterrestrials tend to resemble descriptions of primitive peoples.
Reconsider especially H.G. Shaw’s November 27, 1896 Lodi, CA encounter which enthusiasts see as a proto-Gray. “THREE STRANGE VISITORS Who Possibly Come From the Planet Mars” was the headline. They are human in many respects. They are seven feet high and very slender. The hands are small and delicate without nails. The feet are twice as long as a normal man with long, slender toes used much the same as a monkey. The creature was easily lifted with “a specific gravity” [sic] of perhaps an ounce. They wore no clothing but were covered with a natural growth that felt like velvet. The faces and head are without hair. The nose is like polished ivory. The eyes are large and lustrous. They are toothless and have so small a mouth it was inferred that their lives were sustained by some sort of gas. Not hideous, they had a strange and indescribably divine beauty and grace. They held a luminous material. They inspected the horses, buggy and general area. They attempt to lift the human witness, but they are unable to do this to due to lack of muscular power. They also moved to their ship in 15 feet strides. Their ship, uniquely it seems, went through the air rapidly, expanding and contacting in a muscular motion.
This resembles a Gray only in thinness, baldness, and large lustrous eyes. It is hardly certain the eyes are identical to current lore and lustrous is probably a common description of eyes particularly back then. The points against calling them Grays seem compelling. Most importantly, nothing is said about the head being huge. The superior height is surely problematic. Describing a nose like ivory is inconsistent with the vestigial noseholes said to common to modern Greys. The monkey feet and velvety skin growth would be unique. The Shaw Martians’ inability to abduct humans due to weight is contradictory to later lore. Consider, for example, the Moody case in which investigators are surprised how frail beings could abduct a big man of two hundred plus pounds and 6’2″ tall.
The unusual lightness could fairly be regarded as analogous to later levitational traits in modern Grays, but the striding motion sounds wrong and may signal a flawed way of the writer showing he knows Martian gravity is lighter than Earth. The muscular ship is also singular and unlike modern craft. Airship Wave researcher Neeley regards this as a hoax and feels the fact that the writer was a former publisher argues that interpretation. It is also interesting that this exemplary work of imagination comes from California for there was a nascent literature on science fiction themes in that region. Some of this seems patterned on descriptions of savages, i.e. the nakedness, a Hottentottish build, beauty, and manner. The earliest fictions involving extraterrestrials were often modelled on examples of primitive peoples native to places like the Americas, Africa, and Polynesia. [24]
1947 and all that
The first known entity case in the 1947 Wave occurred at Webster, Massachusetts and was reported in the July seventh Worcester, Massachusetts Daily Telegram. They reported that an elderly woman saw on June 17th a moon-sized object fly by with a slender figure inside dressed in what appeared to be a Navy uniform. As no landing is mentioned nor the closeness of the encounter, it is unclear if this should be regarded as a CE3K. The presence of a Navy uniform unambiguously reflects the presumption of the craft being a secret device of the U.S. government – then, the dominant presumption among believers in saucers. [25]
Also on the seventh, residents of the Center and J Street neighbourhood in Tacoma, Washington, including Gene Gamachi and I.W. Martenson, told of seeing a number of objects, some of which landed on nearby roofs. Witnesses saw several “little people” who disappeared upon the arrival of newsmen. [26]
On July 9th, the Nashville Tennesseean published a long, interesting letter by an apparently sane and sober man telling of his brush with a couple of Men from Mars on a nearby flying field. The strange little men, “all heads and arms and legs, and glowing like fireflies,” landed and alighted from a flying saucer as he drove along a highway, the man wrote. The man from Nashville and the Men from Mars exchanged greetings in sign language and the saucer finally took off. [27] Though the description begs to be written off as the product of a backwoods tale-spinner, the use of sign language is an interesting reflection of the newness of the saucer phenomenon. The lack of a shared knowledge of language presumes a first contact.
The 9th also saw a story appear in the Houston Post which deserves to be reproduced in full:
Circle-Silly: Sailor Sees A Sociable Saucerite
Here is the disc yarn to end all saucer stories in a disc-dizzy nation.
A merchant seaman who swore he never touched a drop, telephoned The Houston Post and said a big silver disc landed in front of him while he was walking in Acres Home addition.
A little man, two feet tall and with a head the size of a basket ball, climbed out of the disc and shook hands with him, the seaman said, then climbed back in and whirled away into the blue.
“Did he look like a man from Mars?” the reporter asked.
“I dunno,” the seaman replied. “I never saw a man from Mars”
Clearly the small size of the body fits half the definition of a gray and a basket-ball sized head is disproportionately large relative to a two foot tall frame. It is consistent with the broad definition of a Gray. Yet, we can’t honestly say it absolutely deserves the label. We don’t know if the head is bald. We don’t have corroborative information that there is any degenerative evolutionary implication in the size of the body. Shaking hands seems faintly inconsistent with the generality of Grays being indifferent to humans. Such hand-shaking is not a common feature seen in modern cases.
Yet is it ground enough to reject the label? There is no fundamental historical objection in thinking it is derived from the tradition of bald, big-headed and small-bodied aliens in earlier science fiction, but there is no overt attempt to call attention to the disproportion of head and body. I would not be the least bit amazed if this Martian owes nothing to this tradition and had some other logic behind it like a sports cartoon.
There is a pair of other stories of extraterrestrials during this wave, but no physical description is present and presumably belongs to the tradition of channelling. An individual in San Francisco learns through mental telepathy with the Dhyanis, rulers of creation, that the saucers are spaceships dropping ‘metaboblons,’ mechanisms to counteract atomic radiation. [28] ‘Metaboblons’ is probably a typo or garbled recollection of the word ‘metabolons’ that had been coined by Lord Rutherford and Frederick Soddy to refer to the fragments of atoms expelled by atoms in the process of radioactivity. The term was used briefly during the first decade of the century, but was quickly forgotten as radioactivity became better understood. The rulers of creation evidently had not kept up with the physics of the time. [29]
Probably the most high profile case of the 1947 wave was the warning of Ole J. Sneide. He claimed to be in contact with The Great Master. He indicated the saucers were more properly called navo. Though ultimately from the greater Magellenic cloud, they came by way of the lesser Magellenic cloud, 47 Tucanae, Omega, and the Alpha Centauri cluster. They had been travelling millions and millions of years and used antigravity and hyperspace to approximate the speed the light. Theirs was a much older world and the Great Master had earlier been on Earth before the fall of the Roman empire, but left via fohatic teleportation. He is now back and what is going to be done depends upon mankind. It is advised physical man set up no belligerence, for just a small concentration of these discs just beyond our atmosphere could clean the surface of our planet completely in a matter of less than 24 hours. Their present local headquarters is on the unseen side of the moon. Mankind will just have to learn their physics over again someday, if they live. “Ah, if they live!” [30]
It is certain from the lingo that Sneide knew science fiction and it is tempting to wonder if it was inspired in part by Joseph Schlossel’s 1931 story “Extra-Galactic Invaders” which similarly featured Magellenic beings, lunar bases, matter transmission, and world-destroying military technology. [31] Some will note the alien warning to mankind that it could lay waste to Earth and thus we should not be belligerent has a thematic resemblance to the later classic SF movie Day the Earth Stood Still. It is more relevant to point out that world domination by superior technology was a favourite pastime of mad scientists and, in that year of 1947, one was threatening earth with an orbiting spaceship equipped with a ray gun in the 15 part serial Jack Armstrong. [32] It’s not exactly The Death Star, but the basic idea seems there.
Outside the United States and, technically speaking, a couple weeks after the Wave of 1947 ended – another first contact account appears on August 8, 1947 in the Diario da Tarde of Curitiba, Brazil. It describes an incident dated to July 23rd. Jose C. Higgins in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, allegedly encountered some 7-foot tall entities that emerged from a 150-foot wide flying disc with a distinct Saturn-like rim. It landed nearby on curved metallic legs. Described as having huge round bald heads, huge round eyes, no eyebrows, no beards, and indeterminate gender, this seems reasonably close to Gray definitions. Interestingly, Higgins indicates they shunned bright sunlight, arguably a weakness. The obvious problem is the 7-foot height, involving legs longer in proportion to ours. Additionally Higgins claimed they show extraordinary agility. They leap and gambol, and toss huge stones. None of this suggests a degenerate body. [33]
Linda Howe’s taxonomy allows the existence of “Taller Gray Beings, No Hair.” [34] Seven feet is still larger than her 5-6 feet range definition. She has an even taller category of humanoid, but these have prominent noses and, often, cat-like eyes. These can also have hair. She does not call them Grays. As Higgins apparently does not say anything about big noses or cat-like eyes, we should wonder how ufologists with an urge to categorise their aliens should regard this case.
We also have to add that the Higgins aliens wore transparent suits that covered their head and body that seemed inflated like rubber bags. They had a metal box on their body. Through the transparency could be seen bright coloured clothing. Such space suits fit the assumptions of the era, but obviously not that of current Graylore. [35] Higgins indicated that one of the aliens poked eight holes in the ground. A large one in the centre, called Alamo, was felt to be probably the Sun. The seventh one was called Orque and it apparently represented their home. This would mean they came from Uranus. Needless to say, this interpretation does not seem especially plausible to astronomically literate people. Bipedal people probably are not likely on a gas giant world like Uranus that has no solid surface. It is believed to have an 8,000-kilometre deep ocean. [36] Nor will you find any exobiologists with any optimism for life on any of the moons of Uranus. [37] Still worse, this is neither Zeta Reticuli nor Rigel nor Betelguese nor Bellatrix, as modern Graylore would prefer. [38]
A further detail guaranteed to diminish enthusiasm for this case is that the final paragraph in the initial account translates as, “Was it a dream? Was it real? I sometimes doubt that it really happened; it could have been a strange but beautiful dream.” [39] Some say this telegraphs intent of hoaxing, but even those with a generous spirit will grant this is fine ground not to be confident this is a real encounter.
Some ufologists would include the Italian case of Professor R.L. Johannis case in this discussion of 1947 entity encounters. He does say his meeting with a pair of short, earthy-greenish, big-headed, big-eyed extraterrestrial beings [above] occurred on the morning of August 14, 1947, but no document exists preceding his March 20, 1964 letter to a Turin ufologist. [40] He alleges he did a sketch two months after the encounter and sent his account to the Italian weekly L’Europeo. The editorial office lost it. Nobody has presented evidence it appeared anywhere in print in 1947, thus the demands of historical study puts a big question mark on how to treat this story. Some people like to think of the case as the first ‘little green man’ tale, but does it really deserve such an honour if it was shaped in a period when that phrase was already a commonplace?
There are large doubts that phrase was in wide use in 1947. Italian ufologist Edoardo Russo has provided circumstantial evidence the tale existed as early as 1955 since Johannis mentions it in an unpublished appendix to a translation of the Leslie/Adamski Flying Saucers Have Landed, but this is unconfirmed. He also indicates that Johannis did speak of his experience to friends in the late 50s. Russo remarks the presence of “a dark brown tight-fitting cap, like an alpinist’s bonnet” seems typical of the 1954 French/Italian wave. [41] A 1955 date of origin seems most plausible, for the ‘little green man’ phrase did become very well-known in that year. [42]
The arguments in favor of regarding the Johannis case as involving Grays are good, but assailable. They are “no more than 90 centimetres in height” and his sketch shows them to be slender. Their heads were bigger than a normal human’s and “they had no signs of hair.” The absence of eyebrows also favours the presumption of hairlessness, but a cap prevents certain knowledge of how bare the skull is. The eyes are enormous, protruding and round; the colour of well-ripened yellow-green plums. They have vertical pupils. The modern taxonomist should probably suggest this is a gray-reptoid hybrid. Johannis however also reports there is green/yellow ring along the circumference of the eyes looking like the frame of a pair of spectacles. This detail seems unknown among other Grays. Johannis describes the presence of a nose, “straight, geometrical, and very long.”
This detail runs counter to the modern generality of vestigial noses or nose-holes. Beneath the mouth is a mere slit, “shaped like a circumflex accent.” This is consistent. A hand had eight fingers -two clusters of four opposed like a claw. This is inconsistent with modern Grays. The green skin colour is fully consistent with modern Graylore. Paul Bennewiz in a seminal March 1986 document avers Grays are only gray when they are dead or in need of formula; when healthy they are generally light green. [43]
The behaviour of the extraterrestrials is interesting. Johannis indicates he felt paralysed as the entities approached, but it seems merely a matter of astonishment at first. After a bit, he is able to wave a geologist’s pick and throw questions at them, but they do not understand him. A ray or puff of smoke comes from the belt of one of the beings. He falls over, briefly paralysed. One alien picks up the tool. Johannis is soon able to sit up. The curiosities here are the facts that paralysis is not attributed to eyes and that this also seems unlike the ‘switched off’ state used by the Grays in the Hopkins era. Johannis recovers far too quickly. We also note again the absence of understanding and no use of Earth languages. This seems again to imply this is a first contact situation and inconsistent with Grays having been here for decades or centuries.
The aliens climb up into their disc and shoot off with such a rush that a cascade of rock and dirt is drawn up to fall in a nearby riverbed. It stops and briefly Johannis fears a sharp flange surrounding the saucer will cut him in half. Then it tips and vanishes and Johannis is struck by a tremendous wind that rolls him over and over. This speediness of the saucer is consistent with the habit of high velocity seen in Fifties cases. [44] In recent decades, saucers prefer to hover and accounts of people rolling over and over due to shockwaves are now hard to find. [45]
Professor Johannis was well known for creating magnificent paintings and he was known throughout Europe for his science fiction, with over fifteen books to his credit. There seems no reason to doubt he had to have known of the orthogenetic future-man idea, given the traditional nature of the idea and image in science fiction.
Taking these 1947 cases as a group, the first thing to notice how few they are in number. There were many more during the Airship Waves. The existence of aliens during the Airship Waves presumably reflects a robust culture of extraterrestrial speculations centred on writings about Mars as an older world where evolution had taken place longer than on Earth. Beyond serious writings suggesting that canals on Mars indicated an advanced civilisation; there was also a genre of fiction dubbed “interplanetaries” which was peaking in the 1890s. [46]
From the start, the Airships were regarded as piloted vehicles. The situation in 1947 was complicated by the fact that the flying saucers were initially only thought of as “objects.” Many took the “flying saucer” phrase so literally that a surprisingly large fraction of the reports were estimated to be less than 3 feet in diameter! [47] Now, subtract some for the popular presumption that the saucers might be secret weapons akin to missiles like the Nazi V-2 rocket-bombs. Lastly, divide into this the brevity of the 1947 wave compared to the Airship Waves. For all practical purposes the 1947 Wave ended by July 13th, lasting not even a month. [48] By contrast, the Airship waves are spread over a period from mid-November 1896 to April 1897. [49]
The second thing to notice is that there is a bias to small beings in this group. While we cannot dismiss the possibility this is a random matter akin to rolling snake-eyes in three out four tosses of the dice, the likelihood of these tales being loaded to favour small sizes is worth considering. This could easily have resulted from that assumption that the saucers were small. Observe, for example, that Higgins, who had the tall Grays, put them in a 30-meter (150-foot) saucer. Johannis would put his little men in a more modest 10-meter (30 feet) saucer. One notable wrinkle, though: the Houston clipping has its little man coming from a “big silver disc.”
I’m thus completely open to the possibility that there may be some alternative factor biasing size to small aliens. What is more notable is that the aliens are not conforming to the way alien sizes were skewed in the Airship Waves. We should not be looking at overarching archetypal, deep mind processes to explain the sizes of aliens. Whatever skewed the Airship wave reports to giantism was no longer working in 1947.
We observe that some of the elements of the orthogenetic cliché seen in this Varicose Brains series seem to be in play already in these first entity cases. One may dispute this and haggle over the incoherence of the cases as a group. Certainly the clustering of traits is most properly assessed as weak and merely suggestive. But one can see well enough that these traits are more present here than in the Airship era. Not to be cruel, but we are obliged to observe that from an evidential standpoint, these cases are tenuous – the best match to Graylore suspiciously is by an SF writer, the next best match puts the Grays on Uranus and has a warning admitting it may be a dream, and in the Houston case we don’t even have the name of the alleged witness.
We will have to snub Roswellians for the moment. Given the evidence that Roswell involved the crash of a Mogul balloon, the testimony of Grays being retrieved out of the Roswell crash are axiomatically and certainly tales constructed apart from the culture of 1947.
A.k.a. Dimmick
We will skip three entity cases of the 1948-49 period for various reasons (Magonia catalogue case 64 – too vague; 68 – Peruvian space mummies backdated from 1967 [50]; 69 –headless figures of unstated size) and jump to an International New Service item dated August 20, 1949. Two prospectors – Buck Fitzgerald and Mase Garney – say they witnessed a saucer crash in Death Valley in mid-July. Two small men, heavily clothed, ran from the crash and disappeared over a ridge. The prospectors pursued but lost them amid sand dunes. The saucer is made of calcium, was iridescent and radioactive, and had small green wires running throughout. The Air Force dismissed this as hoax, apparently without investigation. Though this has been termed a snap judgement, it is easy to guess why the Air Force would not be alarmed. If the aliens must run away and are unable to defend themselves, clearly they are not an imminent threat to much of anyone. Nor does the case sound likely.
Loren Gross suggested in his history that this was our old friends Silas Newton and GeBauer (Dr. Gee), from the later and better known Scully hoax, using assumed names in an abortive plot. The Mojave was their home turf and the site of their doodlebug adventures – they claimed that vast oil deposits existed under the Mojave. [51] Karl Pflock has confirmed this. A memoir in Silas Newton’s hand has him stating he indeed contacted the FBI with the story and GeBauer called “the papers to see if they would bite.” He said he wanted to get into the public mind an aura of mystery, excitement, and government cover-up over saucers and their wonderful technology . [52] Take note of this, you will be quizzed later.
The Scully hoax proper starts in the “Scully’s Scrapbook” column for the October 12, 1949 Variety. From a crash is pulled sixteen men described as the size of Singer midgets. They add the qualifier, “Neither were they pygmies from the African jungle. Something about their bone structure was different” [53] This initial version caused no excitement according to Loren Gross.[54] In the following November 27th issue of Variety, Scully insists the craft in the crash was taken apart piece by piece and trucked to Dayton to study the method of propulsion of the little humanoids’ craft.
It has been alleged that a pair of black albino brothers, Eko and Iko, were successfully displayed in the 20s and 30s as ambassadors from Mars discovered near the remains of their spaceships in the Mojave desert.
There is no direct evidence of why Newton chose the small form. The slight geographic distance between Texas and the Mojave raises a question on whether the 1947 Houston Post landing could have had legs enough to have reached Newton. As the saucer in the hoax is described as being over 100 feet across, we can discount the presumption that the statistical bias of saucers to be small played a role here. The mention of the Singer midgets also however brings up an alternative possibility. Earlier in the century, midgets were considered freaks and exploited by carnivals. Coney Island used a veritable army of 60 midgets with spiked backs in its Luna Park space ride to represent Selenites. [55] It spawned space rides elsewhere.
It has been alleged in Robert Bogdan’s book Freak Show that a pair of black albino brothers, Eko and Iko, were successfully displayed in the 20s and 30s “as ambassadors from Mars discovered near the remains of their spaceships in the Mojave desert.” [56] The mention of the Mojave in the pitch story raises thoughts of possible inspiration for Newton’s tale, however research needs to be done to establish more firmly that the pitch story predates 1949 and is not a folkloric artifact constructed after Newton’s story.
On January 6, 1950 we get the Koehler yarn. The victims of the saucer crash are almost identical to earth-dwelling humans, except for a uniform height of 3ft. They are uniformly blond, beardless and their teeth were completely free of fillings or cavities. They wore blue uniforms with wire threads, six button jackets, and slip-on shoes. They had no undergarments but were taped up. [57] Keyhoe asserts the Associated Press ran an item in which Koehler “admitted the whole thing was a big joke.” But the little men story “ran on and on,” despite this. [58]
Three days later Time magazine gives prominence to other little men stories. In the Rosenwald Foundation crash yarn, two die and one is thrown free. They are three-foot tall and a bit primitive, even monkey-like in appearance. Another yarn says a crash had fifteen survivors. One survivor drew a solar system, pointed to Venus, and they are taken to a pressurised chamber with carbon dioxide to simulate the Venusian atmosphere. The detail of primitiveness at this date is curious. A monkey-type ancestry may indicate thoughts of evolutionary convergence; i.e. monkeys are intelligent and have hands, maybe thus a logical space being. Venus was typically regarded as jungle-like in earlier science fiction, thus offering another possible reason for monkey-like aliens.
The most important tale to emerge in this cluster of crash-retrieval yarns however was told on March 9, 1950 by Ray L. Dimmick: This version appeared in the Los Angeles Mirror:
‘Flying Saucer’ Crash in Mexico Told by L.A. Man
A Flying Saucer recently crash-landed near Mexico City and was seen by a Los Angeles man, he declared today. The disc was staffed by a pygmy-sized man, about 25 inches tall, who was killed in the crash. The tiny visitor reputedly had a large head and a very small body. News of the saucer was given by Ray L. Dimmick, sales manager of a Los Angeles powder company.
Military Takes Over
Dimmick was reluctant to tell his story because of “security” reasons. He said Mexican and United States military officials have taken over the project. Mexican officials reportedly have said that similar strange flying spheres have landed in North America. The governments involved were said to have immediately locked such occurrences in secrecy.
Recently some military men have suggested that the strange objects reportedly seen over the Western United States might be interplanetary space ships. Dimmick said he was close enough to the Mexico City saucer to touch it. He said it was 46 feet in diameter, made of a substance resembling aluminium and was powered by two motors. The bottom was wrecked in the landing. Dimmick’s amazing report came a few hours after a saucer was reported spotted over San Fernando Valley. The strange object appeared twice, flying fast at 400 feet altitude, residents said.
Runs for Telescope
Composer Eddie Coffman, 5451 Kester Ave., Van Nuys, said he first spotted the saucer with the naked eye. Then he rushed into the house and got a telescope. Coffman’s mother, Mrs. Gertrude Coffman, said the object was “like the moon only bigger and it was ghastly white.” Two neighbours, Mr. And Mrs. Reed Hadley, verified their statements. To them, the object in the sky seemed about 50 feet in diameter. This observation was strikingly like of Dimmick and like many others made elsewhere on the North American continent.
Dimmick said a heavy guard had been thrown around the saucer at Mexico City. High Mexican and United States officials reportedly have visited the scene of the landing. But all facts gleaned have been wrapped in stiff censorship. Dimmick said Mexican officials are strong in the belief the little pilot of the saucer is a visitor from Mars or some other planet where life exists.
Dimmick said he has been unable to learn what happened to the body of the Tom Thumbs visitor. [59]
Far more than Scully’s and Koehler’s yarns, Dimmick’s story had legs. Loren Gross avers the Dimmick tale filled the airwaves and triggered scores of requests for more information. The Chicago Tribune complained phone lines were tied in knots over it. The Pentagon came under siege by newsmen seeking details. The American Embassy in Mexico City had a top official meet the press. “I can definitely and officially state that this report is not true.” [60] Time magazine singled it out as the wildest of this group of tales. [61]
It spread internationally and clearly formed the basis of an April Fool’s prank in the German paper Wiesbadener Tageblatt. Just a couple weeks after Dimmick’s tale surfaced they published a photo of an entity being escorted by a pair of military men. It is short, has a large and bald head and large eyes separated by a Y-shaped nose/brow structure. It is breathing from a tube connected to a hand held unit. It seems single-legged on first look, but details clarify the alien is standing on a floatation disk. The date was no accident. The prank was confessed in the April 3rd issue of the paper and confirmed by its instigator Wilhelm Sprunkel in a taped interview with ufologist Klaus Webner, decades later. [62]
The story spread internationally and clearly formed the basis of an April Fool’s prank in the German paper Wiesbadener Tageblatt. Just a couple weeks after Dimmick’s tale surfaced they published a photo of an entity being escorted by a pair of military men.
This photo, or rather a Xerox of it, found its way into Berlitz and Moore’s The Roswell Incident(1980). They wonder if it “may or may not pertain to certain significant aspects of the Roswell incident.” It came to them by way of FBI files from someone who thought it was a picture of a man from Mars in the United States. It is an excellent depiction of a Gray and by 1980 fit right in with the emerging dominance of this form. Ironically this early image of a Gray in UFO culture, the first visual representation of one, was thus a hoax.
It should be emphasised the photo seems unknown to American UFO culture until the Roswell book and could not have influenced pre-1980 Gray imagery. But Dimmick’s verbal description is another matter. The pygmy-sized alien with a large head and a very small body was now part of the saucer culture and a high-profile item at that. Dimmick’s tale was also debunked, however, both by officials in Mexico, and to a large extent by Dimmick himself. Time magazine offered this sequel and epitaph,
“Next day, after thinking it over, Dimmick decided he had been ‘misquoted.’ He had not seen the wrecked saucer or its pilot himself; it was two other guys in Mexico City. Nevertheless, distributed deadpan by the wire services and printed in many newspapers, the Dimmick “little man” story, and variations of it, are still making the rounds. Why is the press ready to print, and the public to believe, such fantastic tales?” [63]
Thus, there was reason to resist patterning one’s tale after Dimmick’s version of the saucer crash. Silas Newton’s version would take a little longer to get debunked. Cahn’s famous exposé on his yarn appears in September 1952. [64] The general cluster of tales probably worked to inspire some amorphous belief under the general principle of ‘where there’s smoke there’s fire.’ Though inconsistent in some of the details, the retrieval yarns did seem consistent in that one detail of their being small. They yielded a generality of saucer aliens as being little. ‘Little Men from Mars,’ ‘pygmies,‘ ‘midgets,‘ ‘tiny space folk were some of the recurring terms.
One interesting item, dated April 10, 1950, has Kenneth Arnold being asked his opinion. “I don’t scoff at reports that ‘little men’ have fled from alleged crack-ups of flying saucers in Mexico and southern California…Who am I to say that no such men exist? My mind is always open to anything. I haven’t seen any of the tiny men myself. But I have letters from persons who have seen them. And they’re serious, too.” [65]
In the September and October 1950 issues of The Steep Rock Echo, the house organ of a major mining corporation, a little yarn started about a couple who saw a flying saucer floating in a Canadian lake. On the deck they saw “about ten queer looking little figures” working on a hose that was drawing up water, possibly extracting something, and discharging it again. The figures were 3½ to 4 feet tall, faceless, and dressed in outfits that were shiny metallic in the chest area, but darker over the limbs. Most wore dark blue caps, but one had a red skull cap. Oddly, they moved like automatons. The teller said he brought a friend to the same spot and, at a later date, saw it again. They startled the crew and the little figures all rushed through hatches, save one. The saucer abruptly took off with one figure still outside. It fell off about half way across the Bay.
This story resurfaced in Fate magazine some years later and eventually in Frank Edwards’ Flying Saucer – Serious Business. Edwards regarded the witnesses as credible and the tale as a seminal benchmark case. In his words, “the strange experience at Steep Rock Lake was to recur many times in the ensuing years.” [66] Subsequently researchers established it was a hoax, fully confessed by its author Gordon Edwards. [67] But not before a funny thing happened.
This story resurfaced in Fate magazine some years later and eventually in Frank Edwards’ Flying Saucer – Serious Business. Edwards regarded the witnesses as credible and the tale as a seminal benchmark case. In his words, “the strange experience at Steep Rock Lake was to recur many times in the ensuing years.” [66] Subsequently researchers established it was a hoax, fully confessed by its author Gordon Edwards. [67] But not before a funny thing happened.
Late in the spring of 1966, William Kiehl sends the Lorenzens a letter about a 1914 incident in which he saw little men working vigorously on a hose from the deck of a flying saucer resting in the water of a Canadian lake. He observed “the size of the heads was large in comparison to the diminutive bodies. Kiehl described the bodies as ‘skinny’” [68] The Lorenzens note that the incident bore some similarity to the Steep Rock case of July 2, 1950. They observe that case was previously recounted in the February 1952 Fate magazine. Fate was the magazine from which Kiehl learnt about the Lorenzens’ interest in UFO phenomena. By this date they also know Steep Rock was a joke. Do they reject Kiehl’s account? They see why sceptics might be tempted to conclude he got his idea from that case, but “The plagiarist generally adheres as closely to the original story as possible in order to give an air of authenticity to his tale.” Big heads and skinny bodies do not figure in the original Steep Rock yarn and the craft is different. The Lorenzens felt such shenanigans are a headache for researchers, but it seems quite straightforward to us. It is a matter of memory gone wrong. Kiehl was 68 at the time of the letter. Details get mixed up from multiple sources with the faceless automatons dropping away in favour of a different case; probably Dimmick, perhaps others we’ll run into later.
Almost as funny, Betty Andreasson, in the 80s, would recount an UFO event involving beings taking water from a lake – “they’re working really quick” – using some hoses that include a green one. [69] Raymond Fowler reprints extracts from The Steep Rock Echo and gushes, “The similarities between Betty’s experience and that of the Canadian man and wife are striking.” The crafts are similar. The sizes of the entities are similar. Their motions are similar. There are similar vibrating sounds and an explosion. The colours are similar. But Fowler is completely oblivious of the confession by Gordon Edwards. [70] The deduction is unavoidable. This abductee is confabulating material acquired in her reading as part of her own experiences.
The ‘little men’ generality would be reaffirmed in rumours throughout the Fifties. Harold T. Wilkins repeated a pair of them from 1952. Joe Roher of Pikes Peak Radio Company, talking at a Pueblo, Colorado Chamber of Commerce luncheon, alleged “A little man from a saucer is being tenderly cared for in the incubator room at San Diego, while cadavers of two saucer pilots are being dissected by surgeons of the Medical Division of the US Army Air Force…. The little saucer men have a smaller bony structure than earth men, but the bones are proportionally heavier and their stomachs smaller.” [71]
On July 24, 1952, he got a letter from a fellow describing a meeting with a nice reliable fellow who has a pal in the Air Force who says the Air Force is keeping alive an alien in a pressure chamber somewhere in California. He a little fellow three feet tall who was the only survivor of a saucer forced down by radar in the Arizona desert in 1950. They are showing him pictures and teaching him to read and write. [72] Dorothy Kilgallen, in a 1954 column, would state a British official of Cabinet rank told her “we believe on the basis of our inquiries thus far, that the saucers are staffed by small men – probably under four feet tall.” [73] Carl Jung, in 1958, would also comment on this being a general bit of accepted lore: “According to the rumour, the occupants are about three feet high and look like human beings or, conversely, are utterly unlike us. Other reports speak of giants 15 feet high.” The giant is obviously The Flatwoods Monster. [74]
Early tales towing the little man line include an Oxford, England account of a bus conductor, perhaps whimsically, “There is flying saucer right over my vehicle with lots of little men with ginger hair inside having tea.” This was apparently offered amid a flurry of reports over a parachute training balloon broken loose from its moorings. [75]
It also seems to have made inroads into contactee belief. George Hunt Williamson offered an early taxonomy of eight types of aliens that includes “The Intruders” which are described as small in stature with strange oriental eyes. Their faces are thin and they possess weak bodies. They are said to prey on people and project themselves into weak earthly bodies. Their wisdom has merit, but is materialistic.. [76] Nothing is said of big bald heads, but the sense of degenerative nature is reinforced by a plea to “Pity them.” It is very curious to see this in such an early contactee work, given their usually utopian bent.
Ethereal Aluminium Monkeys
The June 1950 Talk of the Times reproduced a pair of photos received from Cologne, Germany, one of which is a retouched picture of Dr. E.W. Kay’s model saucer that appeared in the press on January 11, 1950. The other is of two agents holding up a small humanoid with proportions somewhat like a small monkey. The caption reads, “As one silver capsule broke: the first Mars man was captured! Eyewitness G-man, McKenerich, from Phoenix (Arizona), reports ‘I was astounded by the importance of this great moment. For the first time I was seeing a being from another world. At the same time I was equally amazed by the desperation of this Aluminium Man. His body was covered with a shiny metal foil.’ The observatory in Phoenix, Arizona, presumes that this is for protection from cosmic rays.”
In the October issue, they aver they had scooped the entire magazine world with the picture of “the little man from another world” and their office was being flooded with requests to get prints, requests it was impossible to fill. They also state they do not have the names and addresses of the people in the picture. They counter talk of this being a hoax by emphasising that “there is no material on this planet which would even approach the type of material that covered the body of the little man, after he had been taped up.” They speak of it as a “little man from Venus” and add material from Scully’s book. [77]
In the August 25, 1950 Point: San Diego Newsweekly, Meade Layne embellishes the Aluminium Man story of June. The picture of the monkey-sized alien, it is alleged, was “suppressed in this country. Smuggled to Germany they appeared in a Cologne newspaper. An associate in that city dispatched reproductions to Layne. They show a 27-inch aluminium man, purportedly captured after crashing near Mexico City last spring. Flak rockets hit a disc and 20 silvery capsules fell to ground. McKenerich is quoted as saying,
“I was astounded by the importance of this great moment. For the first time I was seeing a being from another world. His body was covered with a shiny metal foil – presumably protection from cosmic rays. The 27-inch man was no pushover. It took 5 men to over power him, according to Layne’s data. Then, exhausted, the invader passed out, was put in chains and given a stimulant. (The captors, some think, had taken a stimulant too) The critter put up a fruitless fight after coming to, then died suddenly – two hours from the moment of his landing.”
Layne discusses his cosmological beliefs about Etheria being a larger globe surrounding us and explains, “The Etherians keep archives on dying civilisations, such as ours. They send out so-called flying saucers to reconnoiter and collect information.” Etherians can ‘think’ saucers into existence. He reminds everyone they called Galileo crazy in his time. [78]
A couple weeks later, still more embellishments appear. The cover of Point exclaims in huge letters “More 27 inch Men!” The Aluminium Man photo is accompanied by a second photo attributed to geologist David Shantz in Death Valley. This photo shows a number of figures in the distance but with too little definition to even tell if they are any different in appearance from humans. Shantz tells of seeing a saucer landing on April 17 with “several tiny men frolicking about – less than 30 feet away. They appeared luminous and ghost-like.” One figure moves his hands as if warning him not to take the photo and when he does the leader shouted orders in a guttural, high-pitched voice which caused the figures to race back to the saucer. Checking the area later, he saw no footprints.
Meade Layne says he received over 2000 reports of sky objects after the prior article about Etheria and he is convinced the operators of these ships have made a number of landings. He also talks about Ezekiel, a flying pig over Virginia 50 years back, and, strangely, flying bananas over Fort Worth. I say strangely because the obvious humorous allusion to monkey aliens escapes Layne’s comment and maybe even his notice. The 27-inch men are from Etheria, invisible and untouchable. Etherians are great godlike creatures 9 to 10 feet tall. They live 200 to 300 years. They reproduce like humans. They can think themselves down to 27 inches to facilitate manoeuvrability of the craft, but they can think themselves to the size of mountains. [79]
Donald Keyhoe felt the Aluminium Man was the most outrageous of the Scully cluster of tales. [80] He seems dubious about this guy surviving a crash. The monkey-like character of the entity seems obviously based on the Rosenwald Foundation yarn from earlier in the year. More recently, it has been pointed out by Hans-Werner Peiniger of a West German UFO group that it was certainly another April Fool’s prank since yarn’s author’s names are G. Falcht and R. Logen. This is literally translated as ‘forged’ and ‘make-believe.’ [81] Though the tale was not widely repeated, the photos turned up repeatedly in the UFO literature. [82]
The Edward Watters “shaved monkey” hoax of July 9, 1953 may belong to the Rosenwald Foundation line of influence. [83] More firmly, a line burped up in the Herbert Schirmer hypnotic regression of June 8, 1968 stating, “They looked to be shaped more like a monkey than us” can be tied to the Rosenwald Foundation yarns. The regression brought up other material from this cluster of tales. [84]
Specifically Schirmer spoke of the aliens having bases on Venus and “UFOs have been knocked out of the air by radar” which is repeating material from the George T. Koehler yarn of January 1950. [85] The detail does not seem to fit with the drawing Schirmer offered which seemed fully human.
There are other more ambiguous examples around. A Spanish case dated to June 1955 speaks of “a very strange dwarfish being resembling a gorilla.” It had a Herculean chest and arms, very small legs, and wore plastic coveralls and a hood. [86] An August 4, 1968 case from Montreal, Canada speaks of a 3 ft. tall “monkey man” with long curving arms that made a tremendous leap and disappeared. These seem ambiguous, as there is no mention of a craft in these cases. [87] Also of interest, more tangential than directly related, is Don Worley’s collection of two dozen UFO-related encounters with ape-like, Bigfoot, and Sasquatch entities from the early 1970s. [88] They were large, clearly reflecting the widespread popularity of Bigfoot mythology in this period rather than any historic link to the Rosenwald yarn. Still, this retention of a premise of evolutionarily primitive man-apes within UFO lore has to be a matter of historical notice.
Reign of the Pygmaliens
In November and December of 1954, a series of reports from South America reached the United States telling of small, hairy humanoids with glowing eyes and prodigious strength. Ufologists were impressed, notably APRO and Keyhoe. Jose Alves of Pontal, Brazil sees three little dark-skinned men in skull caps collecting herbs, grass leaves, and river water. [90] Lorenzo Florers and Jesus Gomez meet four little men who try to drag them into their craft. Flores strikes one of them with his unloaded shotgun and the gun broke apart. They were immensely strong and hairy. [91] Jesus Paz was set upon by small hairy man-like creatures and rendered unconscious. His friends, hearing him scream, ran up and saw one of them. They took him to a hospital where he was treated for shock. Hospital authorities noted he had long deep scratches down his spine as though by a wild beast. [92]
José Parra, a jockey, reported seeing six little men pull boulders from the side of the road and put them into hovering saucer. [93] Gustavo Gonzales and Jose Ponce meet small hairy men wearing loincloths. They scuffle and Gonzales’s knife glances off. Similar little men carrying dirt and rocks leap into a sphere in the meantime. Temporarily blinding Gonzales with a light, they climb in as well and rapidly take off. [94]
José Parra, a jockey, reported seeing six little men pull boulders from the side of the road and put them into hovering saucer. [93] Gustavo Gonzales and Jose Ponce meet small hairy men wearing loincloths. They scuffle and Gonzales’s knife glances off. Similar little men carrying dirt and rocks leap into a sphere in the meantime. Temporarily blinding Gonzales with a light, they climb in as well and rapidly take off. [94]
One may well wonder if the talk of hairy men wearing loincloths could reflect a delayed recurrence of Dimmick’s description of pygmy-like humanoids. This may merely be accidental similarity, for one can also think of the Yahoos in Dean Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels - described as hairy, dwarfish scrabbling creatures of unbridled appetites and lesser folkloric hairy men that are common in mythology. Regardless of the significance or lack thereof of Dimmick’s precedent, American ufologists read a pygmy ancestry into these stories. Said Keyhoe,
“The existence of these hairy dwarfs was hard for me to accept, even though the Ituri pygmies of Africa came close to fitting the description. This pygmy race, existing in East Africa’s Ituri forest, was almost unknown until it was studied by the Reverend Dr. Martin Guisinde, professor of anthropology at the Catholic University of America. Father Guisande, who for years has studied small-sized beings in many parts of the world, found that the Ituri pygmies had clay-yellow bodies covered with thick, dark brown hair. Small creatures – less than 5 feet high and weighing less than 90 pounds – these pygmies manoeuvre through the forest as expertly as monkeys, swinging from branch to branch.
Since the towering jungle trees hide the sky at all times, the Ituri pygmies live out their lives in a dimly lighted world. So accustomed are they to this semi-darkness that they actually fear the sunlight. Even if they dared venture outside the forest, their strange eyes, conditioned to darkness, would be almost blinded by the sun’s glare.
As I examined the curious evidence, something inside me fought against acceptance of the hairy-dwarf idea. My feeling, I realized, was a subconscious longing – the same thing which John Du Barry and I had discussed that night at Larchmont. I knew now that I hoped the UFO race would not be unlike our own.” [95]
Keyhoe goes on to cite that evolution would not favour duplication of the human form. He notes that a Navy man with impeccable credentials was advancing this hairy dwarf business. “Do you think this hairy dwarf business could be the answer?” asked Stirling. “I suppose it could be, Bob…but I hope to heaven these stories turn out to be hoaxes.” They doubted they would though. [96]
Before the Venezuelan dwarf reports there had been very little similarity between any of the ‘creature’ stories. Most of them were such obvious fakes they were not even worth considering. Some of the Venezuelan reports also had a suspicious sound. Yet APRO’s on-the-scene investigator was convinced that the story by Gomez and Flores, at least, was true. Coral Lorenzen would affirm the Jesus Paz hairy dwarf story was “one of the first believable accounts of contact with occupants of UFOs.” [97]
Morris K. Jessup in The Expanding Case for the UFO expanded on Keyhoe’s notion:
“If we do indeed, have ‘little people’ within the UFO, as reported by observers of varying responsibility, then we may assume that the Pygmies, at some remote epoch, developed a civilization which discovered the principle of gravitation and put it to work.”
This first wave of civilisation occurred in the time before the Biblical Flood ruined the earth. Clark reports that “Jessup’s fantastic notions appear to have convinced no one, and his pygmies as humanoids hypothesis died with him two years later.” [98] This appears to forget Otto Binder’s Flying Saucers are Watching Us (1968). Binder briefly recounts Jessup’s theory that the original starmen were pygmy types and were able to interbreed with a flourishing culture of pygmy humans 20,000 to 40,000 years ago. The ancestry of pygmies themselves purportedly was a mystery. This interbreeding produced oversized mutants that resulted in modern man. Binder goes on to talk about other data suggesting “anthro-biological experiments of the spacemen in their ancient brain-breeding program on earth.” [99]
Little men encounters continued in South America. The most important is surely the Villas Boas classic. The male abductors are determined to be 1.55 meters or a little less. The men grab hold of him and drag him to the craft. They talk in a growls and grunts. The aggressive and animal-like nature of the interaction recalls the Venezuelan stories of Flores and Gomez, but there are notable differences such as AVB’s abductors having small, light-coloured eyes instead of glowing ones. AVB’s abductors wear space suits while the Venezuelans speak of hairy dwarfs. The female seductress was even shorter – about 1.35 meters. He describes her as a small figure that reached to the height of his shoulder. He is able to give her a violent push that sends her reeling backwards about six feet in the initial moments of capture.
This point needs emphasis. It is a radical difference from modern Gray methods: “He was asked if he thought that his actions could have been carried out under his captors’ willpower or telepathic suggestion. The answer was negative. He declared to having been the master of his own actions and thoughts throughout his adventure. At no time did he feel he was being mastered by outside power or pressure. “All they got from me was by the fist,” was his only comment. He denied having received the slightest mental influence or telepathic message from any one of them.” [100]
This is so unlike the methods of the Hybrid Program it borders on bizarre that certain ufologists think the AVB case has been made more credible by the current ascendancy of the theory of The Breeding Program among ufologists like Jacobs and Hopkins. The female has a number of features unlike standard Grays: blonde white hair, big blue eyes, ordinary ears, freckled arms, bright blood-red armpit hair, well-developed hips, large thighs. She also growled, giving him “the disagreeable impression of lying with an animal.” [101] She also had high prominent cheekbones that made the face wide, “wider than that of an Indio native.” [102] The overall effect is, again, more of a primitive race than a futuristically evolved humanoid.
In 1966, Coral Lorenzen notes the little men phenomenon is widespread. They appear in large numbers in 1954, confined first to Europe and South America. The South American little men form three groups: 3 ft. hairy midgets, 4 ft. human-appearing creatures, and 5 ft. average men with or without space-suits. The midgets are animal-like and gather specimens. Lorenzen remarks,
“The hairy little men may be some type of lower form of life such as our anthropoids, which are pressed into service for the purpose of gathering various samples of flora and fauna, and routine jobs such as gathering mineral samples. They certainly do not react to the presence of humans as do their more human-appearing counter-parts, the “little men.” This not a completely unlikely theory – in man’s first attempt to put a living thing into orbit around the earth a dog was utilized, and later chimpanzees. The “dwarves” may even be conscripts from a planet within our own solar system.” [103]
Though examples of big-headedness appear in Lorenzen’s 1966 book, they do not form part of the generalisation.
An analysis of occupant cases restricted to America and the period 1947-65 and published in 1969′s The Humanoids had Lorenzen stating ‘little men’ “seem to be one definite category.” They clearly dominate even in America, at one point outnumbering the average-sized and giant cases combined by a ratio of better than three to one. Lorenzen does not provide entries in the analysis for most of the Scully cluster of crash-retrieval yarns. Though it is clearly stated most researchers reject them, Lorenzen makes the amazing remark, “subsequent incidents seem to indicate Scully was either telling the truth or that he was a prophet.” The little men “generally answer the description given by Scully.” This information is given in an entry on the 1949 Death Valley yarn. Lorenzen was seemingly impressed by the fact that this case predating the Scully tales “has not been exposed as a hoax,” thus seemingly leaving open the unsaid possibility that Scully was influenced by this genuine case. [104] Okay, class, why is this a problem? Hands. That’s right, Silas Newton’s memoirs eventually provided proof it was a hoax.
Frank Edwards parallelled the Lorenzens’ perceptions by noting in a chapter “Who’s Driving?” of his best-seller that “most of the reported beings are said to be small, more like pygmies or dwarfs than hissing stinking giants” (a la Flatwoods). [105] He recounts cases like those of the Venezuelan flap favoured by APRO and argues “From all parts of the globe, the descriptions of the alleged operators are remarkably uniform. There is either a world-wide conspiracy to lie about these things or a great many people, including some who have never heard of flying saucers have seen some very strange creatures of unknown origin.” [106] This argument is one we’ll meet again. Edwards nowhere speaks of large bald heads either as a generality or a repeating trait.
Edwards would distort details to preserve this appearance of uniformity. He describes the Father Gill case as involving “small manlike creatures,” but Gill indicated they had “the outline of normal human beings” and nowhere gives a size estimate. [107] Socorro is purported by Edwards to involve “two small man-like beings dressed in white or silvery coverall type garments” or “humanoids,” but Zamora’s statement reads, “These persons appeared normal in shape – but possibly they were small adults or large kids.” He makes no reference to the outfits possibly being silvery, only “two people in white coveralls.” [108] Zamora was said to have publicly downplayed the humanoid aspects of the encounter on the advice of an FBI agent, but privately would emphasise the figures were “quite a bit shorter” than a nearby bush measured as 5′ 2″ tall. But, even privately, he indicated there was no headgear and did nothing to suggest the outfits resembled spacesuits. [109]
Otto Binder, in a 1974 article surveying 400 occupant cases, indicated 280, about 70%, involved beings below average in height. There was no consistency. Of skin and clothing colouring he lists: All black; blue and bearded, green skin and hair, shining yellow eyes, black face, and glowing green torso; Dun, like potato bags; fish-scale skin, legs golden yellow; striped clothing; bright red faces; pure white skin. Anatomical features showed no consistency either. He lists Dwarfs, hairy bodies; glowing orange eyes; misshapen bald head; no arms; slit mouth, nostril holes; 3-fingered hands; shrivelled face, white hair, pumpkin head; 8-fingered hands; large chests; huge heads; furry, clawed hands; thin, hooked nose; heads like potatoes; one-eyed; elephantine ears; fingerless hands; twisted legs. Some walk or run; some float; some can vanish. Some are vicious; some are shy; some are indifferent. [110] Blatantly, Binder’s survey undercuts the argument of Edwards.
Binder’s emphasis on diversity in 1974 is an interesting contrast to thoughts expressed in a 1971 fictional work he penned called Night of the Saucer. While briefly accepting that a wide variety of forms visit do study earth, he notes that since 1950 reports have tended to involve “hairy little brutes” about three and a half feet tall with glowing owl eyes, slit mouths, and flat noses. They wear silvery suits and helmets. He trots out the Venezuelan cases favoured by APRO and Keyhoe and cites other real cases from the UFO literature showing a habit of rock collection.
Out of this, Binder concocts a fast-paced adventure in which the “hairy humanoids” play the villains in a scheme to collect chips of super-nova fragments which will be used to turn the Earth into a flying bomb that will crash into the centre of galactic government and make it possible for them to plunder the galaxy. The primitive nature of this UFO alien form is repeatedly emphasised with talk of them as little hairy brutes, horrid hairy brutes, ugly dwarfs, sawed-off furry dwarfs, and nasty hirsute creatures. They have feral faces, make beast-like sounds, attack like a wild animal, and live in an underground base composed of cliff-dwellings. [111]
In 1975, Albert Lancashire made a bid to being the first British abductee when he told Jenny Randles of having a series of dreams or visions during an October 1967 wave. They involved an entity wearing a surgeon’s mask who examines him while on a bed. He sees a woman of oriental appearance in the strange room and several ‘pygmy men.’ Lancashire backdates the origin of the vision to a UFO sighting in 1942 when a beam of light from a glowing light caused a floating sensation in him. Jenny Randles indicates she was able to establish Lancashire had told his story a decade earlier, in the Sixties. [112] The oriental woman could be inspired by the Villas Boas case which, by 1967, was becoming well known. The detail of ‘pygmy men’ is clearly consistent with the generality discussed in the UFO literature of the Sixties.
In a 1976 survey of occupant cases, James M. McCampbell similarly reports a clear dominance of humanoids being diminutive. 61 of 81 entity cases with quantitative estimates were dwarfs. Among those with no quantitative estimates, there are another 58 qualitatively considered dwarfs. Add them up and there were 119 dwarf cases. The modal value was 3 feet. He surveys some of the correlative features found in these reports and observes, “Certain aspects of this description strongly suggest that the race of little people on UFOs are pygmies displaying many of the typical characteristics of achondroplastic dwarfism.” [113] This seems to be the last time that anyone would remark on the resemblance of ufonauts to pygmies. The era of the pygmy aliens – when the size of the entities’ body was the sole generality – can, as a matter of convenience, be said to end here.
Have you any Grays poupon?
We have already pointed out that Dimmick’s tale of a tiny visitor with a large head and a very small body achieved photographic expression in a German April Fool’s prank a few days after its inception in 1950. There seems little cause to doubt the Dimmick case was known throughout Europe due to international news services. How the tale was presented in France is a matter we can only hope researchers will take up and fill in some day, but it does not seem an unreasonable assertion to think people in French news agencies were aware of it.
I will confess some reservations about commenting on some early French cases. A case in Vallee’s Magonia catalogue places 1.5 meter men with oversized heads near Tonnere, France as early as September 4, 1953. The 5-meter long craft spread wings that made it look like a butterfly. [114] This would be the earliest gray-like being in France if it is not a backdated tale, a common threat. We also see there an August 23, 1954 case wherein Elise Blanc saw two small beings in silvery dress, grunting like pigs. [115] No comment.
It is when France had its Great Martian Panic in September 1954 that things get really interesting, for that is when the Marius DeWilde encounter pops into the picture. In his notorious analysis of the 1954 French wave, Aimé Michel devotes three and a half pages to the DeWilde case. Some details there of interest include the beings located on what was called the ‘smugglers path.’ He denies this had anything to do with smugglers.
“The beam of my light caught a reflection from glass or metal where the face should have been. I had the distinct impression that his head was enclosed in a diver’s helmet. In fact, both creatures were dressed in one-piece outfits like the suits that divers wear. They were very short, probably less than three and a half feet tall, but very wide in the shoulders, and the helmets protecting the heads looked enormous. I could see their legs, small in proportion to their height, it seemed to me, but on the other I couldn’t see any arms. I don’t know whether they had any.”
Shortly after, he is blinded by a powerful light like a magnesium flare coming from a dark mass sitting on the railroad tracks. He is paralysed. He shortly recovers and sees the dark mass rise from the tracks. “A thick dark steam was coming out of the bottom with a low whistling sound.” It gained altitude then turned east towards Aznin. A helicopter seems unlikely due to telegraph wires. This would presumably also argue against a balloon, but that talk of steam is pretty curious.
 |
| From Nord-Eclair, Lille, France, September 16, 1954. |
The story was widely disseminated. One newspaper, speaking of George Pal’s War of the Worlds film then playing nearby wrote, “Marius DeWilde saw a big head protected by some kind of glass helmet.” In the Paris paper Soir, it was rendered, “Both were little beings with enormous heads.” [116] DeWilde would later deny this and was quoted as saying, “on the contrary to what some of your colleagues have written, they did not have a big head.” [117]
Jacques Bonabot’s Dossier Quarouble 1954 includes a drawing by DeWilde and it does not seem much different from a normal teen wearing a motorcycle helmet. [118] It seems probably significant that we don’t find any detail proving the figures were related to the dark mass, i.e they were not seen entering or leaving it. The story seems potentially resolvable down to mundane happenings given oversignificance by the presence of an unusual bright light. There has been talk of physical effects on the nearby railway tracks, but drawings in Bonabot’s research file show a pattern strongly suggestive of them having been created in the manufacture of the wooden ties.
The distortion of the report by the papers seems to prove preconceptions of aliens as big-headed were already in place. The Dimmick case seems one likely source. Some cultural groundwork was also provided by science fiction. It is known there was a sudden influx of English translated SF books, mostly from the U.S., into the French marketplace in the post-war 1950s. [119]
Other cases in the 1954 Wave clearly owe their existence to the media dissemination of the DeWilde case. On October 9, 1954, In Munster, Germany, a movie projectionist named Franz Hoge reported watching a saucer land in a field. Hoge discovered a cigar-shaped machine hovering six feet above the ground, giving off a brilliant blue radiance. Just after this he sighted four small – 3½ foot tall – peculiarly shaped creatures with “thick-set bodies, oversized head, and delicate legs” and wore rubber like clothing.” [120] It is notable that this case got back to the States via The International News Service (INS) and prompted Keyhoe to worry that it allowed people to ridicule more important reports. [121]
Also notable was a case from Borrasole near Toulouse, France on October 13, 1954. M. Olivier (a former pilot), M. Perano and a third witness encounter a ufonaut 1.20 meters tall wearing a diving suit. “His head was large with respect to the rest of his body, and he had enormous eyes. The suit was bright and shiny like glass. The craft was surrounded by a glow. One man paralysed on approach. The craft took off quickly throwing him to the ground. [122] A photo of a chalk outline of the Toulouse Martian drawn on barn by Francois Panero and Jean Olivier appeared in November 1, 1954 Life magazine with caption reading “Dumpy little space man they saw land in luminous sphere on basketball court near Toulouse.”
Next month, Life also took note of some later cases from Italy.”Out of these conveyances stepped little men of many colours, mostly pleasing pastels.” They also cite the chameleon zebra case and also mention “a little whiskered man in fur coat and orange corset.” Two photos show men with hands set about a yard above the ground. The caption reads “Martian Men’s Height is shown by two bakers. Pierre Lucas of Loctudy was going to a well when, he said, orange ball fell from the sky. Suddenly a small bearded figure with one eye in middle of forehead tapped him on shoulder. Serge Pochet of Marcoing was approached by two small shadows.” [123] It probably helped in reinforcing the image of aliens as smallish in the States.
In 1966, Jacques Vallée’s Challenge to Science hit the scene in the United States. Vallée’s work is clearly skewed by his immersion in material from the 1954 Wave. He gives an important assessment that brings forward important defining traits of the Gray alien:
“(Space brother) accounts should be definitely separated from reports made by psychologically stable and genuinely puzzled citizens. What the witnesses of this latter group describe is very different from the ‘space brother’ image. The typical ‘visitor’ of these reports is a man of small stature, dressed in shiny clothing or in an ordinary one-piece suit. The suit may hide his head; if the face is described, it is generally described as larger than the human head, with large protruding eyes. Some of the reports insist that the dwarfs have hair on their faces, and sometimes all over their bodies, either their own or dark fur clothing.” [124]
This is important in offering an early incentive to believing and bringing forward accounts of bigheaded, big-eyed aliens of small stature. You will be judged more stable than contactees. The following year, the Lorenzens add a sentence to their thoughts about ufonauts that show fresh awareness of Vallee’s viewpoint:
“Features which have been repeatedly described have been large eyes and large craniums and small stature.” [125]
This is a modification from their earlier work in which they recounted one or two cases of bigheaded saucer occupants – Valensole [126] – but did not notice their repetitive character. [127] In what is generally regarded as his magnum opus, The UFO Experience (1974), J. Allen Hynek would follow Vallee and Lorenzen and note the repetitive character of certain traits later ascribed to Grays: “Large heads, spindly feet, and, generally a head that sits squat on the shoulders without much evidence of neck are often described.” [128] This is not yet regarded as the general form. That detail about the absence of a neck will become much more interesting later in this history. Binder noticed the presence of big heads in his survey, but did not comment of their being a generality.
In a 1975 UFO documentary, The Force Beyond, there is a life-size doll alien that is alleged to be a computer composite of entity reports. The face is unusually large. The cranium, though bald, is undistinctive and almost on the small side. The eyes are reddish, tear-drop shaped, glass-like. There is a conspicuous nasal structure above visible nose holes. The ear region is quite oddly done, clearly inhuman, but not elf-like, either. They are like wedges molded upon the side of the head. The mouth is unusually long, though properly line-like. The shape of the face is overly round. It is definitely not yet a Gray. When MacCampbell offered his analysis of ufonauts he would also notice that big heads appeared repeatedly, but he, too, offered no numbers or comments such as to suggest they were the general form.
The 1965 Valensole, France case was presumably an important event in reinforcing Vallee’s generality for European ufologists. On July 1, 1965, M. Maurice Masse, 41-year-old lavender grower sees 4 feet tall humanoids with pumpkin-like heads, high fleshy cheeks, large eyes which slanted away, mouths without lips, and very pointed chins. One points a pencil-like object at him and he stops in his tracks. In a later interview he indicates there is a mental relationship between men and these beings, but it is “a felt relationship,” akin to a religious concept.
In a 1971 article for Horizonte, Aimé Michel indicates Masse’s descriptions have remained consistent across investigations. Of twenty-one details of the head of the Martian given, nineteen appeared in previous cases. Two details had never been seen before. One of the new details was that the head was naked, whereas previous cases had heads encased like a cosmonaut. This leads Michel to remark they must now have adapted to our atmosphere and its pressure in some manner or other. A good dozen American cases subsequently corroborate the new detail. Though he obviously means to impress people by saying he works with more than 18,000 cases including hundreds that have details consistent with Valensole, this casts a shadow in the wrong direction for critics.
“We consider the Valensole Affair to be one of the most important cases in the history of the subject.”
Given so many cases to work with, matching some details would have to be inevitable, even if imagination was a purely random process, which obviously it isn’t. Worse, it is hard to gauge their significance since Michel laments he cannot provide the details of this analysis. We are given neither the cases that matched nor even the details of what matched! [129] What is the most striking incongruity is the presence of alien feelings in contradiction to both earlier SF and later UFO lore that emphasises lack of feelings in Grays. Michel would elsewhere team up with Charles Bowen of Flying Saucer Review to offer the opinion, “We consider the Valensole Affair to be one of the most important cases in the history of the subject.” [130]
On February 11, 1967, Vyacheslav Zaitsev reports a tale in Soviet Weekly of granite gramophone discs discovered by Chinese scientists in 1938 in a high mountain cave. Aliens crashed 12,000 years earlier and clashed with the natives. Chinese legends indicate a pair of debased local tribes represents survivors. The Ham and Dropa are described as “frail, stunted men.” They are small, ugly, bigheaded, spindly-legged, yellow-skinned, but defy ethnic classification. Gordon Creighton points out that Ham and Dropa are probably variations on the words Kham and Drok-pa, which refer to Tibetan people. However the Kham are great strapping, barrel-chested experts in martial arts who make impressive soldiers. The Drok-pa are Tibetan highlanders. Creighton dismisses the tale as fantasy. The tale had a measure of popularity among ancient astronaut buffs. Most importantly it appeared in Erich von Daniken’s writings. [131]
There were other cases of relevance emerging in this period, such as the Agentina case of Villegas and Peccinetti. On September 1, 1968, Juan Carlos Peccinetti and Fernando Jose Villegas of Mendoza, Argentina were paralysed by three beings. They were 1.5 meters tall and seemed to be of human shape but had hairless heads that were “strikingly” larger than normal. Their movements were gentle and quiet. They tell them, “Do not fear. Do not fear.” They’ve made three trips around the sun, studying customs and languages. Mathematics is the universal language. “The sun benignly nurtures the system; were it not so the solar system would not exist. They trace inscriptions onto their vintage car. They show them a circular TV set showing images demonstrating the lesson of nuclear war. The case was quite well known in South America and Spain. A. Agostonelli considers the case a hoax. [132]
By January 1973, Spanish ufologist Antonio Ribera writes in correspondence to a fellow ufologist, “we can already talk about the classic humanoid: the humanoid with big eyes and a big head.” [133] Among American ufologists, this elevation to classic status would take a little longer to emerge. That, however, is another story. He adds that he feels the great diversity of ufonaut descriptions can probably all be reduced to three or fundamental types with the differences being dismissed as due to the personal equation, i.e. differences like those seen among witnesses to an auto accident. [134]
On January 7, 1974 a man known only as Monsieur X drives from Comines to Warneton on the Franco-Belgian border in his Ami 6 and sees two entities in suits with rings around the torso and cube-shaped helmets with a glass window in front. The shape of the head is an inverted pear. It has two perfectly round eyes like marbles. The nose was small. The mouth was a horizontal slit with no evident lips. There was a soft light in the helmet that allowed Mr. X to see details. The colour is a uniform grey. At one point the aliens turn their heads in perfect synchrony, a seeming echo of the Hill case (Barney: “Because everybody moved – everybody was standing there looking at me.”) [135]
The height of one was about 4′ 8″ to 5′. The build was somewhat athletic with broad shoulders and narrow hips. He sees them again 5 months later. [136] This case achieved enough minor notoriety for the drawings to reach the United States. The head shape displays some interesting similarities to the later Moody and Walton aliens, but the fact that they are enclosed in helmets is an interesting disparity that reflects a common presumption of this decade that aliens should wear space suits. [137] Needless to add, one wonders why these Grays are wearing helmets given that guess by Michel that Valensole showed they had adapted to our atmosphere almost a decade before Warneton.
In 1979, Eric Zurcher tried to find some order among 142 entity cases catalogued in France, but ended up with a confusing typology consisting of 8 main groups, but 16 sub-groups. The biggest group were ufonauts of small size. Subgroups A and B seem to collect primitives. The A type can’t be communicated with and makes growling sounds or piercing cries. They sometimes run away, but can be aggressive. They paralyse people with a tube. They seem to wear uniforms of various dark colours and berets or similar head covering. The skin has a clear colour. There were 33 cases. The B group has bald heads that are slightly large. The eyes are bigger than normal. However they have pointed noses and chins. A beard was noted on one. The skin is brown and wrinkled. They are also passive-aggressive: running way or using paralysing tubes. One case demonstrated an able ability to speak something that resembled German. There were five cases.
The C group comes closest to our idea of Grays. The skull is completely hypertrophied in relation to the body. It is bald. It has a flattened nose and an atrophied chin. The shoulders are wide. Zurcher says the skin is very white in this group. There is a hole in the place of the mouth – an unexpected echo of Wells’s Martians in War of the Worlds. While they communicate with inarticulate growls among themselves, one case reported such an entity spoke in French and ordered him to turn back. They otherwise behave like both A and B groups. Depending on how to treat cases in the Valensole region, there are either 6 or 9 of these cases. One notable confusion is that Zurcher treats all aliens with diving helmets covering their heads in a separate group, even when they are small. [138]
One rather striking feature to this taxonomy is the absence of certain generalities of the modern Grays. Beyond the problem of no gray skin, there is no talk of large all-black eyes or long necks. Why does the French version have a mouth hole instead of a slit mouth?
Pro-Choice
Let’s stop here and digest what we’ve found out. One, the aliens of the saucer era are biased to smaller-than-human sizes. The aliens in the airship era were biased to larger-than-human size. There were no good examples of Grays, reptoids, insectoids, or robots in the Airship era. None of the beings wore space suits or diving suits either. After 1947, these dominate and this follows a period in which science fiction dealt with these ideas repeatedly. If this is not a cultural matter, we shall have to ask ourselves if the airship aliens were supplanted by a different mix of aliens. This should trouble those folks who combine the premise that consistency of form validates the ETH with the premise that aliens have been with us throughout history.
Two: we should note that imagery roughly consistent with the idea of the Grays appears early, but in circumstances that are fairly embarrassing. The 1947 material is unpromising if one hopes that it conforms in all ways to current ideas about the Grays. The Dimmick case stimulated a photo that seemed promising to later ufologists unaware it was a confessed April Fool’s prank. One tempting inference is that it shows how widely available the Wellsian future-man SF cliché still was in 1950. Ufologists have been quick to dismiss the elements of Gray mythology in early SF as merely coincidental stuff inevitable in a huge body of SF artistry. Yet this photo presents an interesting challenge. If these ideas of the Grays had no special cultural significance, why did the hoaxers choose this particular form? Isn’t the likely answer, given what we saw in Part 2, that the hoaxers felt it was so familiar that most of the potential audience would accept the form as alien? Ponder also that this Gray happens to appear in the earliest occupant photo hoax on record. If bald, bigheaded humanoids were merely one form among dozens, why does it emerge in UFO hoaxing so quickly?
Three: Gray imagery, though it appears early, does not dominate in this period. The first accepted generality was the formula that alien humanoids are little and pygmy-like. Details in these early cases tend to be spare and contradictory. Foreign cases seemed especially likely to follow material in the most widely disseminated case of the period, the Dimmick yarn. The big-headed, small-bodied humanoid takes root first in France and the acceptance of the form by French ufologist Jacques Vallee regains the form a foothold when he comes to America. Actually, it should be confessed that that it had not been totally banished. There was that confusing Salzburg case (Should one treat it as a 1951 case or 1957? Austrian or Canadian? Near-Gray – as in Spacecraft from Beyond Three Dimensions - or slightly Gray as in the initial accounts?); [139]
Edmund Rucker’s El Cajun, California encounter with four philanthropic creatures with bulging eyes and domed foreheads mentioned in the July 1958 issue of Flying Saucers; [140] Alfred Horne’s 1962 letter to Walter Webb talking of a 1956 encounter with a wrinkly green dwarf having a high-domed head, nose holes, but also bloodhound ears, and filmy snake-like eyes; [141] and the 1965 sighting by Ellen and Laura Ryerson of a trio of 5′ 2″creatures with white-domed heads and protruding eyes in a bean field near Renton, Washington. [142] These obscurities had little significance, beyond being more evidence that the cliché was not dead. Neither Keyhoe nor the Lorenzens evidently spoke of these cases in their books.
Four: some were seeing the repetitive nature of bald, big-headed ufonauts as early as the mid-Sixties and Jacques Vallee, in a major book, was indicating an analytic preference for people who saw them over against the contactees. The Kham and Drok-pa yarn of 1967 is another sign that elements of future Gray mythology were recognised by hoaxers as a good plausible form for an alien in this period. If the Gray form is ‘just’ one among dozens of possibilities, why did they choose this form – again?
We have ranged virtually all over the world following the twisting trail of the Grays and we seem almost in sight of the Gray’s ascendancy. Annoyingly, however, we are going to have to backtrack to pick up some guys that weren’t hiding in the jungle of UFO mythology.
References:
- Neeley, Robert G. UFOs of 1896/1897: The Airship Wave FFUFOR, n.d., pp. 46-69, case #1
- Neeley, case #6
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- Isabel Davis & Ted Bloecher, Close Encounter at Kelly and Others of 1955 CUFOS, 1978, p. i.
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- Diario de Tarde, de 8 de agosto de 1947, full Spanish text reprint, unreferenced, letter Luis Gonzalex, March 22, 1999.
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- Kottmeyer, Martin “Was The War of the Worlds Inspired by UFOs” The REALL News, 8, #7, July 2000, pp. 1, 7, and “Aliens from a Dying World” forthcoming
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- Mannix, Daniel P. “Freaks, We Who Are Not as Others” as a source.A photo at the atomic books website – Shocked and Amazed VIRTUAL MIDWAY – has a photo of them with the phrase Barnum’s “Original Men from Mars – EKO and IKO” with a caption describing them as “the sheep-headed men, the Ambassadors from Mars, stars of carnival, Coney Island and the “big one” - Ringling brothers, Barnum and Bailey Circus” www.atomicbooks.com/shocked/gallery/ekoiko.html.
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- For fullest details of the confession and a reprint of the original article see John Robert Columbo, UFOs Over Canada, Hounslow, 1991, pp. 32-41.
- Coral and Jim Lorenzen. Flying Saucer Occupants. Signet, 1967, pp. 19-26
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- Raymond Fowler. The Watchers. Bantam, 1990, pp. 72-4.
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- Keyhoe, Donald. Flying Saucers from Outer Space, pp. 45, 112
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- Chaplin, James P. Rumor, Fear, and the Madness of Crowds, Ballantine, 1959, p. 124 was one of the few works to refer to the tale behind the photos
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- Janet & Colin Bord, The Bigfoot Casebook, Stackpole, 1982, chapter 7.
- Coral Lorenzen, Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence for the Invasion from Outer Space, Signet, 1966, pp. 50-1; November 4, 1954.
- Bowen, Charles, The Humanoids, Henry Regnery, 1969, pp. 95-6; December 10, 1954.
- Bowen, Charles, The Humanoids, Henry Regnery, 1969, pp. 96-7; December 16, 1954.
- Bowen, Charles, The Humanoids, Henry Regnery, 1969, p. 97; December 19, 1954.
- Coral Lorenzen, Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence for the Invasion from Outer Space, Signet, 1966, pp. 57-8; November 28, 1954.
- Keyhoe, Donald, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, (published December 1955) pp. 238-46.
- Ibid.
- Coral Lorenzen, Flying Saucers:The Startling Evidence for the Invasion from Outer Space, Signet, 1966, p. 55.
- Jerome Clark, Spacemen, Demons, and Conspiracies: The Evolution of UFO Hypotheses, FFUFOR, 1997, p. 19
- Otto Binder, Flying Saucers Are Watching Us, Belmont, 1968, pp. 124-5, 127.
- Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants, Signet, 1967, p. 62.
- Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants, Signet, 1967, p. 54.
- Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants, Signet, 1967, p. 53.
- Coral Lorenzen, Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space, Signet, 1966, p. 193, 213.
- Coral Lorenzen, “”UFO Occupants in United States Reports” in Bowen, Charles, ed. The Humanoids, Henry Regnery, 1969, p. 144.
- Frank Edwards, Flying Saucers – Serious Business, Bantam, 1966, p. 90.
- Frank Edwards, Flying Saucers – Serious Business, Bantam, 1966, p. 102.
- Stan Seers, UFOs The Case for Scientific Myopia, Vantage, 1983, p. 52.
- Brad Steiger, Project Blue Book, Ballantine, 1976, p. 118
- Ray Stanford, Socorro ‘Saucer’ in a Pentagon Pantry, Blueapple, 1976, pp. 20, 42, 58-60.
- Otto Binder, “The Clues that Prove UFOs Come from Different Galaxies” Saga’s UFO Report, Spring 1974, p. 41.
- Otto Binder, Night of the Saucers, Belmont Towers, 1971
- Jenny Randles, The Complete Book of Aliens and Abductions, Piatkus, 2000, p. 19.
- James M. McCampbell, Ufology, Celestial Arts, 1976, p. 119.
- Case #117
- Case #137
- Harold T. Wilkins, Flying Saucers Uncensored, Pyramid, 1967/1955, p. 53-4.
- Bonabot, Jacques “Dossier Quarouble 1954″ Bulletin du GESAG, #72, Jun 1983
- Bonabot, Jacques “Dossier Quarouble 1954″ Bulletin Du GESAG #72 (June 1983) thru #86 (December 1986) – a 14 part series.
- Roger Bozzetto, “Current Trends in Global SF: Science Fiction in France: The Comeback” Science Fiction Studies, 26, (1999) p. 431.
- Robert Girard, An Early UFO Scrapbook, Arcturus Book Service, 1989, p. 153
- The Humanoids, p. 39; Keyhoe, The Flying Saucer Conspiracy, Fieldcrest, 1955, p. 207.
- The Humanoids pp. 44-5 case #111. An accessible reproduction appears in Clark and Truzzi’s UFO Encounters: Sightings, Visitations and Investigations, Publications International, 1992.
- “Astral Adventurers” Life, November 1, 1954.
- Vallee, Jacques and Janine, Challenge to Science: The UFO Enigma, Ace Star, 1966, pp. 176-7, “The Martian in the Twilight” segment of Ch. 9.
- Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Flying Saucer Occupants, Signet, 1967, p. 203.)
- Coral Lorenzen, Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence for the Invasion from Outer Space, Signet, 1966, p. 232-3
- Coral Lorenzen, Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence for the Invasion from Outer Space, Signet, 1966, pp. 192-3, 213
- J. Allen Hynek’s The UFO Experience, Ballantine, 1974, pp. 184-5. The paragraph this appears in, strangely, has an error. He observes that ufonauts “come in two sizes, large and small, with the former predominating.” Obviously he meant to say ‘latter,’ but he did not.
- Aimé Michel “A Proposito de los Platillos Volantes” Horizonte 15 March/April 1971, pp. 19-29.
- Charles Bowen, “A Visit to Valensole” in Bowen, Charles, ed., Encounter Cases from Flying Saucer Review , Signet-New American Library, 1977, pp. 57-71.
- Creighton, Gordon, “But I Read it in a Book!” in Bowen, Charles, Encounter Cases from Flying Saucer Review, Signet, 1977, pp. 85-94. A recent repeat of the story sans doubts appears in IUFO Chat Archive: Sept. 25, 1999, Steve Wingate.
- Bowen, Charles, Encounter Cases from Flying Saucer Review, Signet, 1977, pp. 131-8 and letter September 16, 1999 Luis Gonzalez. Original witness drawings in Dr. Roberto Banchs Los Identificados #7 p. 5. Gonzales letter 11-11-99.
- Gonzalez letter, March 26, 2000, quoting from a book of Ribera’s correspondence.
- Antonio Ribera, Aimé Michel, Jacques Vallee, Cartas de Tres Herejes [tran: Letters of Three Heretics] Madrid: Ediciones Corona Borealis, 1999, p. 115.
- John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey, Dell, 1966, pp. 119-20.
- Coral and Jim Lorenzen, Encounters with UFO Occupants, Berkley Medallion, April 1976, pp. 200-1, 342-7; also Flying Saucer Review, v. 20, #5 1974 and reprinted in Bowen, Charles, ed., Encounter Cases from Flying Saucer Review, Signet, 1977, pp. 116-24. The drawing can be briefly seen in the 1975 documentary The Force Beyond.
- Kottmeyer, Martin “Diving to Earth” Magonia Monthly Supplement 26, April 2000, pp. 1-3.
- Eric Zurcher. Les Apparitions d’Humanoïdes. Editions Alain Lefeuver, 1979, pp. 32-7.
- Peter Rogerson “Notes Toward a Revisionist History of Abductions, Part 1 – Fairyland’s Hunters” Magonia 46, June 1993, p. 6.
- Ufolore, p. 191 citing MUFOB n.s. 12 and Flying Saucers magazine July 1958
- INTCAT # 661.
- August 13, 1965: Brad Steiger. The Flying Saucer Menace. Universal Publishing, 1967 in 64pp. magazine format, p. 31 archived on Rense.com website. Immediately after this paragraph, Steiger gives a few lines to the Maurice Masse case on p. 32 perhaps thinking their similarity is obvious.